Over00Solo game dev thoughts2016-11-27T17:19:19Zhttp://www.over00.com/index.php/feed/atomWordPressOver00http://www.over00.comhttp://www.over00.com/?p=33822016-11-27T17:19:19Z2016-11-27T17:11:51ZNo discount for the Autumn Sale

You probably haven’t noticed but some games are not “participating” in the Autumn Sale. Games likes Rimworld, Planet Explorers, Xenonauts and probably many more I don’t know about (it’s hard enough to find specific games with discounts during a seasonal sale so finding those without discounts is even more difficult).

My first thought was “well this is dumb, why give up the chance to make some more sales”. This is how I think because to me, these sales are pretty much how I make most of my money. Outside of them the money I make is depressingly low now. This is the reality of games doing just “okay”.

But then I asked myself what I’d do if my games were making the same kind of money they are making during sales when at their regular prices. It’s quite possible that March of the Living wouldn’t be 50% off right now. I mean, if I’d already be making decent money why would I rush to lower the value of my game? I could wait a bit longer and turn discounts into something much more significant when the time comes.

No additional visibility

For the vast majority of indie devs, the current Autumn Sale will be no more than a regular weeklong deal, probably even worse. Steam has decided that a bunch of AAA games and indie hits would appear on the front page during this “event” so chances are that only people having your game on their wishlist will notice that you are “participating” to this sale.

The main appeal of these sales as a dev is that you hope your game will received exposure it usually wouldn’t get. There are currently 13,579 games on sale right now so the fact your game is cheaper than usual really isn’t special. You could run the same discount the week before or after the sale and end up with the same results. If you remove all possibility of additional exposure then the appeal of this sale is quite diminished.

How much does your game really cost?

In an era of constant and expected discounts, the regular price of your game really doesn’t mean much. When $20 games can be bought for $5, all you need is a little patience and you can pretty much buy any games you want at the same price. By reducing the price of their games any chance they get, devs are simply making sure that $20 really means $5 after all.

It’s easy to blame devs for destroying the value of their games but when you make most of your money when your games are cheaper than usual you really don’t have a choice. I can decide to let my game at full price and make $250 in a month or I can use a discount and make $2,000 instead. Being proud that I don’t sell my game for cheap won’t help to pay the bills.

If your game is a bigger success and you already manage to make $2,000 or more per month though…

Don’t blame the little guys for this culture of discount

Many devs are panicking when they see a bunch of cheap games flooding Steam but the truth is these games don’t sell much or don’t sell at all. Even when I sell my game Bret Airborne for less than $3 I sell very few copies. If you’re tempted to blame me for destroying the value of all games then you’re looking in the wrong direction.

When I see top sellers reaching 40-50% discounts within a year though, I can’t help but wonder if these devs are just greedy. Sure, a 50% discount will dramatically raise sales and you’ll make a bunch of money but was money so bad to start with? If you’re already making a decent living then why rush with discounts and lose sales you could have made at regular price?

Someone will probably try to explain to me how the market works and I get it but my point here is that you can’t complain about games losing value when you’re using a scheme you wouldn’t really need to use after all. But of course, why leave money on the table if it can be in your pocket instead…

There will still be discounts tomorrow

It’s not about to end but maybe some devs will start to realize that they have nothing to gain from events completely ignoring them. We just got out of the Halloween sale and we’re already in another sale where games are handpicked so if you applied a discount twice but didn’t make the cut and your game was already doing very well then you just shot yourself in the foot.

I don’t know if it’s what really motivated the devs of Rimworld, Planet Explorers and Xenonauts but considering these games can probably hope to get a shot at a midweek madness or daily deal at some point that will give them a lot of exposure, it makes sense to think that they saw they had nothing to gain from the current Autumn Sale.

]]>2Over00http://www.over00.comhttp://www.over00.com/?p=33652016-11-21T16:39:07Z2016-11-21T16:30:07ZMy game March of the Living made more money than I have ever seen in my life if you look at the gross revenue. Of course, once you remove Steam’s cut and then split what remains with the publisher, what is left will be more or less the same kind of salary I was making when I had a day job. It haven’t been a year since the game was released and it can be tricky to make predictions so I don’t know for sure what the picture will be on the game’s first anniversary.

When seeing the results during the first week of release, I thought sales would be much higher six months later, specially that the game was well received. One thing I learned is to be much more careful when trying to make predictions. In fact, six months later I can say that 67% of the money the game made was during its first week of release and 80% during the first month…

Sales over 6 months

This uncertainty when you released a game with that kind of results can be a challenge if your objective is to remain a full-time indie dev.

Taking the long tail with a grain of salt

Have you ever heard “Your game will do fine over X months or years…”? When you just released your first moderate success and are counting on the money it makes to pay the bills in the present, the long tail isn’t your primary concern. It sure is nice if your game can make $300,000 over 5 years but it still doesn’t help you right here, right now.

The long tail can also be a very short tail. I have two other games on Steam that I released in 2015 that are now pretty much dead. They were not successes when I released them so they have little to no effect on my current financial situation. They still make a bit of money from time to time but nothing I can rely on.

Things get even more complicated as your revenue may vary a lot from month to month. Many weeks you’ll sell just a few copies or none at all and only during special sales will you suddenly see an increase in sales. It means that you really have to be careful with your money and always have to make sure you somehow managed to keep a safety cushion as some months will be really thin.

It’s not that the long tail should be dismissed as this might eventually be how you manage to remain a full-time indie dev once you have released a few games that are doing reasonably well but when you just got your first game that should be doing fine over a few years, it still doesn’t fix the present.

Managing risks and dealing with unpredictability

So you decided you want to remain a full-time indie dev and are carefully setting money aside for when sales won’t be so great. How much money do you have left to work on your next project once the bills are paid? Probably not a lot as remember, you don’t get the money all at once. Of course, if you released a hit that sold 50,000+ copies in a month then it might be a different story…

You are now entering the realm of risks management. How much can I reasonably risk assuming I’ll keep making an undetermined amount of money in the future? Some are more adventurous than others so it really comes down to your tolerance to risk. Two persons in the same situation might have completely opposite reactions based on their personalities. Your life situation can also have a big impact on how you react. If you have kids, a house and other financial engagements then you might not want to risk as much as when you were younger and had less responsibilities.

Considering all of the above, I have to conclude that my own tolerance to risk is pretty low. This can be a problem as this might mean I’m missing opportunities but I’m not one to bet everything I just made hoping the next game will do even better as I’ve seen way too many games that were supposed to do well ending up being disappointments. Even successful devs don’t know for sure how well their next game will perform and I’ve seen quite a few scratching their head wondering what the hell just happened when they thought they had a solid game that did poorly.

When dealing with risk management you always have to keep in mind that you can’t really predict what might be coming or not. At best you should always consider the most pessimist scenario when making decisions. For example, it could have been easy for me to think that March of the Living would make quite some money by being selected to be part of the Halloween sale this year (based on results from other devs it’s an event that is doing quite well). The game is relatively new, it’s doing okay and it fits the theme perfectly so how much did it make during this sale? Well, it wasn’t selected to appear on the Halloween page so it didn’t make much at all (less than a weeklong deal). I can’t even say that it wasn’t selected because it’s not doing well enough as I know of at least one game that was selected and that performed a lot less than March of the Living on its release day. So why wasn’t it selected then? Lack of luck I guess…

The lesson here is to not put too much hope on things you don’t control. Good if you’re lucky but you shouldn’t count on getting lucky as part of your business plan as obvious as it might sound.

Independent you say?…

Talking to other indie devs, many feel like they’re back to square one after releasing a game. You made money to pay the bills but can’t quite put the necessary resources on “that great idea you have”. In my case, I find myself in the exact same position I was when I lost my day job and needed a publisher to make any project possible. That’s not being as “indie” as I’d like it to be…

If you have to rely on a publisher to keep going forward then it means you are raising the bar of the level of success you must achieve to make just enough money as you’re most likely giving up half of your revenue or more (often publishers will have different percentage of revenue distribution until they recoup their money). For example, if I would have been able to release March of the Living without a publisher then my financial situation would be quite different. I’d be able to fund my next project without any help and pay for living expenses for at least two years before really having to get “new” money. Of course I try not to think too much about that as without a publisher this game wouldn’t have been possible anyway.

This can become a vicious cycle as it’s already difficult to release a game doing okay but if you need it to do twice as well so you can become truly independent then you might have to rely on a publisher for quite a long time.

This is why you see so many indie games with publishers backing them. We all like to think about games that were big hits and provided quick financial independence to the devs but it’s often something that took years to achieve. Reaching self-sustainability isn’t easy and often cannot be done by just doing okay.

This is nothing new

Many indie devs could have written about this (or already have), it’s simply not making the headlines. “Indie dev doing okay but still struggling” probably isn’t a title that would get many clicks.

I’m pretty sure most people know that this is not an easy business to dive into and I surely knew it for having released quite some not so successful games over nine years but I think we can easily become numb to this fact when we keep hearing about success stories. I’m the first to admit that I’ve been guilty of this at times.

Like anyone else, I surely wouldn’t mind to release a big hit but my first objective was always to just make a decent living. To do okay with the additional bonus of working on what I want when I want to. Now that I’m at this point though, I’m realizing that things are not as bright as I thought they’d be.

I’ve been hearing about indie devs dealing with regular anxiety issues and I frankly didn’t understand them as they were doing what I was hoping to do one day. I may have even been quick to judge them in a way I now regret as now that I’m in their shoes, I’m dealing with the exact same issues. It shows that even when you’re told something, you don’t always listen or even refuse to…

]]>2Over00http://www.over00.comhttp://www.over00.com/?p=33512016-11-13T17:35:41Z2016-11-13T17:35:41ZFor some reason I didn’t noticed the big change to the “recently updated” section on Steam with the latest discovery update. It fixed a problem while taking away from devs an interesting tool to increase exposure of games.

Better communication with players

When the DLC The Three of Us for March of the Living was released I faced a really big issue. How do I make sure that current owners of the game know a DLC for the game was released? Sure I posted an announcement on the game’s page and then used a visibility round to hope to reach as many people as possible but there was no guarantee current owners would see this announcement.

Before the latest discovery update, when you released a game on Steam you were getting 1,000,000 impressions of your banner on the front page of Steam (and maybe other places). Beside this initial visibility, you get 5 additional visibility rounds of 500,000 impressions each and can earn more apparently if the game did well somehow (the requirement isn’t clear but March of the Living earned 1 additional visibility round). Using such visibility round would display your game on the front page of Steam for everyone to see, even people who didn’t own the game.

It was a problem as of course a DLC only makes sense if you already own the game. Communicating efficiently with current owners was simply impossible.

The latest discovery update fixed this as now only people already owning the game or having it on their wishlist will see your updates when you use a visibility round. It means that if you just released a DLC that you probably have better chances to make more sales as you’re speaking directly to people already interested in your game.

It’s also a powerful tool for games in Early Access to let people know that a major update just happened as it’s possible people bought your game early then stopped playing for some reason so that way you can bring them back to your game again (and maybe have reviews changed if your game is now better for example).

No exposure at all to anyone else

This week, I announced the bundle for March of the Living (it includes the game, the DLC and the soundtrack) so I naturally used a visibility round to give this update some exposure. I was hoping this visibility round could increase wishlist stats in time for possible future sales but then I completely forgot that it wasn’t working that way anymore.

I was checking the number of clicks this visibility round was generating and was thrilled to see it was performing a lot better than previous visibility rounds. The problem though is that I forgot I wasn’t exposing the game to new possible buyers. If you already have the game and maybe the DLC, then this visibility round really does nothing to improve sales. If you have the game on your wishlist then you know there’s a bundle you can buy instead of just the game alone but you’re probably waiting for a discount anyway.

And if you don’t know March of the Living exists? Well you won’t learn about it from this visibility round… (unless the news would be propagated but it’s not the case so far as it’s hard to get people excited for a bundle of a game that did just “okay”)

The result of this visibility round is that I don’t see any increased sales or wishlist addition which was the case before the latest discovery update. At the very least I guess that some people who didn’t know a DLC was released for the game now knows about it because we announced a bundle but the bundle itself isn’t interesting to them.

Fixing a problem by creating a new one

It’s great that we can now better communicate to players already interested in our games but it happened at the cost of not being able to reach anyone else. In my mind, both system could have existed side by side.

First, having to use expendable visibility rounds to communicate updates about a game isn’t optimal. You can only update your game 5 times before running out of visibility rounds and then you lose all means to efficiently communicate with your players base (unless they keep visiting on a regular basis the game’s page to check themselves if the game was updated which isn’t great). Imagine a game in Early Access for a year and then releasing a few DLCs. These visibility rounds will quickly disappear.

These update announcements could be following the same rule as when you apply a discount to your game. You can only do so once every 8 weeks but you can do this an unlimited number of times. This would prevent spamming people with announcements. It could even be time limited (1 week for example) instead of assuring you of 500,000 impressions. For March of the Living, these 500,000 impressions are like showing the same announcement 10 times to current owners and people with the game in their wishlist which isn’t really useful.

Secondly, visibility rounds could have stayed what they were before, meaning allowing to expose your game to people who might not know it exists. With the new setup of the home page I don’t know where it could fit but such system could still run in parallel with one that allows you to communicate to current players.

Maybe Valve is counting that the other changes part of the latest discovery update will be enough to keep exposing games to new potential players but there wasn’t really a need to remove a useful discovery tool so we can communicate better with current owners. Better communication was needed for sure but it’s a bit sad something else had to be removed to get it.

]]>0Over00http://www.over00.comhttp://www.over00.com/?p=33462016-11-08T21:57:21Z2016-11-08T21:57:21ZJust by quickly checking the top section “Featured & Recommended” I discovered 3 interesting games and not new ones. One was released back in March and another one in 2014. I doubt I would have ever heard about these otherwise since they seem to fall in the same category as March of the Living (doing okay but not major hits so they don’t receive much exposure on Steam or from the press).

At first sight the new discovery update seems promising. Let’s dig deeper.

Featured & Recommended

It’s a mix of these big titles everyone already knows about (so not that helpful but seeing a bunch of big AAA titles there makes sense I guess) and games that fit better what you might like. The balance between these two types seems good as right now I see 3 AAA games vs 9 indie games that fit better my taste. The indie titles are still fairly big hits (Gone Home, Dear Esther) but like I said above there are also lesser known games appearing there and not necessarily recent ones.

This might help to further the life of indie games just doing okay as this big spot wasn’t quite accessible before and it’s the best exposure you can get. For example I can hope that two years from now that March of the Living might still show up there from time to time to some people.

Best of all, you can mark some games as games you are not interested in. After a couple of refresh some truck simulator game showed up there so I mark this as “Not interested” and so far I haven’t seen any other driving simulator game. There’s no point ever showing me these games as I’ll never buy them. I’m just not part of the crowd interested by these.

Special offers

Really big amazing and… curated spot… Most of us will never see our games there. It probably requires a publisher able to speak to Valve or that you are one of the few having a relationship with a Valve employee (pre-Greenlight era dev) or you already released a hit so being featured there won’t make the different between you having to find a day job or not.

Truth is we don’t really know how to get in there and I wouldn’t call the upgrade this section received (it was there before but smaller) an upgrade to “discovery”. As a modest indie dev having released a moderate success this section does nothing to help people to notice my game. Well, unless for some unexplained reason someone decides to put March of the Living there… Bottom line should be to not expect anything from this section as a dev (unless you fit the cases I listed above).

Trending among friends

I’m having difficulties analyzing what kind of effect this spot might have as I have only 2 friends on Steam and don’t really care about the whole community aspect as a player. As someone with only 2 friends on Steam, right now I see 1 well-known game and 3 games I never heard about. So in my case I do get to discover new games but I suspect that if you have many friends that you might end up seeing a clone of the top sellers list in that section.

But like I said, I don’t care about having friends on Steam as a player so I don’t have much data here.

Your discovery queue

I’m really not convinced this section is doing much good. When it first appeared I sure browsed it quite a bit as it was a curiosity but now it’s a bit like Greenlight, I don’t care about it. It’s not a way I enjoy to discover new games.

The 3 choices offered don’t quite do what I’d like them to do. The “Not interested” button is great as I can tell Steam that I don’t care about sports or driving games. What I’d also like to tell Steam though is “I don’t want this particular game but this is still a genre that interest me”. If I don’t want to follow or add to my wishlist a game it appears like it’s not a genre I like so I’d like a 4th option to make sure Steam understand that I still want to know about this type of games.

Browse Steam

This section is a weak one in my opinion. The “Specials” list just shows about 30 pages of small icons so it’s just to say that you can actually see all games currently discounted. I doubt anyone will really take time to browse this list.

The “Free Games” list might be a curiosity to check from time to time but nothing too exciting here. I still think it’s nice they give some exposure to free games on a store (and it’s not just F2P MMOs).

The “By User Tags” page is a mess right now. The first thing to fix would be to at least order tags in alphabetical order. If I want to filter by the tag “Rogue-Like” I have to do Ctrl-F first and type rogue-like to see where the tag is…

The “New Releases” page is really neat and it’s a bit sad it’s “hidden” behind an ordinary looking button that you have to scroll to see. This page shows the typical new release stuff but also recommendations based on other games you’re playing. This is really big in my opinion and I don’t know why not more emphasis is put to get players to check this page. If there’s something I’d like to know it’s what other games similar to those I already enjoy were released recently. As a dev it’s really neat too as you have a better shot to reach people who might enjoy your game. It’s not helpful to show your game to 100,000 persons not interested by the genre of your game.

Curator Recommendation

Well if you can’t get the press or youtubers to review your game then you’ll be left with giving away Steam keys for free so one of the other curators list your game…

The biggest curators are press and youtubers so probably few of us will see their games listed there. Well it’s not true. Curators with 200-1000 followers might list your game but the impact will be very limited.

Everything else below

At this point I feel like many people have stopped scrolling. The “Under $10″ section might occasionally give some exposure to your game but then how many games (including discounts) are below $10? Right… So don’t get your hopes up with this section.

]]>1Over00http://www.over00.comhttp://www.over00.com/?p=33282016-10-23T18:32:51Z2016-10-22T16:52:25ZThe Humanity Hypothesis is my next game to be released in 2017 and before going further I suggest you start following the blog of Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green which is my partner in this project: http://psychochild.org/ He’ll have a lot to say about this project and might challenge what you probably assume from seeing the teaser we released.

Dealing with reality

After the release of March of the Living, I spent a LOT of time analyzing what it meant to me as a now full-time indie dev. The game did okay but didn’t exactly made me rich. I started to calculate to which point in time the money I made would take me and I concluded that it would be around the end of Winter 2017.

This might seem really nice (and yeah it is) but there’s another side to being able to sit on my ass all day long working on whatever new project I might have. I need to be able to fund it. To give you an idea, a project like MotL would cost me about $20,000 to make assuming I do pretty much everything myself with the help of a few contractors for art, music, trailer, etc. It shouldn’t be that much money if I’m able to last until Winter 2017 with the money MotL made right? Well, not exactly.

When you release a game you know how much money you make at release but you have no idea how well it will keep performing for the rest of the year. In other words, I didn’t have $20,000 to take out of my pockets yet as the money don’t all come in at once. You get $2,000 there, then $3,000, then maybe only $500 and so on. During this time you have to pay for living expenses so it can be hard to really grasp how much money you can spend on your next game (unless you made so much money that you already can pay for all living expenses for the year of course…).

Spending $20,000 on my next game would also mean that I then can’t last until the end of Winter 2017 so I’d risk not being able to finish the game before it’s too late.

Pitching projects to publisher

This was my first reflex. It worked for March of the Living so it should work for whatever other bright idea I might have right? Not exactly. Getting a good idea at the right time that will interest the right people is not easy. Sometimes you just don’t have that much of a good idea to start with. Sometimes the idea might be good but it leaves cold the person you’re pitching it to (for whatever reason, not everyone enjoy the same things). Sometimes these people you need to fund your game are simply too busy working on other projects at that time.

I have worked of a few ideas that way and only the concept of a game like The Humanity Hypothesis got any traction. There was one big problem with such project though…

Splitting profits too many ways

This is something a lot of indie teams don’t seem to consider. You can find quite a few postmortems about games that did quite well (often way better than MotL) but ended up not making that much money for each person involved in the project because there are too many people. It’s true that some projects requires having more people involve but then if the game needs to be a hit to be profitable… Bottom line is that I still make more money with a modest success than some team members having released a quite successful game.

The requirement for me to work on a game like The Humanity Hypothesis was that Brian needed to be involved to work on the writing and narrative design. I don’t have such skill and Brian showed how gifted he is when he designed and wrote the DLC for MotL. So going with a publisher here would mean to split profits 3 ways. Just so you know, if it would have been the case for MotL then I wouldn’t be talking about a new game as a full-time indie dev right now…

Of course I’m just assuming this next game might only do as well as MotL but that’s how I think. Maybe it will be a huge success but if you’ve been reading this blog for some time you should know that I don’t approach things this way. I’m not the kind of guy who will go all in to hope to hit the jackpot. I just want to make a living to be able to make games full-time as long as possible. It’s hard enough as it is.

Because of that, I dropped the idea of going with a publisher. Well, at least I dropped the idea based on the specific deal that was available. Maybe another deal might have changed my mind but it wasn’t a possibility here. Can I fund this project? In fact yes. It do requires to be resourceful and making some tough decisions but I’m used to this. My nine years of experience working on games taught me so.

But what is The Humanity Hypothesis exactly?

For now I’ll say that it’s in 3D, first person view and unusual. Want to learn more? Why don’t you check the Greenlight page on Steam. Yeah, I have released 3 games there and still have to go through this useless process that approved 350 games this very week… Basically everything is approved but you just don’t know when it will happen…

]]>2Over00http://www.over00.comhttp://www.over00.com/?p=33202016-10-14T13:19:17Z2016-10-14T13:17:27ZI’d love to go at Steam Dev Days one day but not for the talks or the foolish hope that it would help me to generate more sales. I’d be meeting fellow devs I’ve been chatting with for some years and it’d might be a good way to meet new people who maybe might help my future games to be published. Assuming my introvert personality wouldn’t get too much in the way, I’d spend my days shaking hands and wouldn’t care about anything said on stage.

Money is short though so I can’t really afford such event or maybe I should say that I decided to put that money elsewhere. It’s just not the kind of money I’m ready to lose in case I fail to shake the “right” hands.

I’ve been keeping track of Steam Dev Days on Twitter and the “important” info I wanted I got but I’m not seeing much value from the event itself (the real value must be during parties).

VR

I understand that VR might become very big in a few years but it’s honestly something I don’t care about. I can’t even afford to buy a VR kit and not all games will need to be in VR in the future anyway. It’s a curiosity I’ll be watching but one I’m not in a position to be part of.

It’s in Valve’s best interest to be part of the first few pushing VR but I feel it will be something many devs will fail to grasp. If you’re rich and can afford the exploratory period then you should totally go for it but if you’re just a modest dev trying to make a living then you should just forget about it. Right now, VR is still trying to figure out how it can become mainstream and what kind of games have a decent chance of becoming moderate successes so hearing about it extensively really does nothing for someone like me.

Steam controller & Link

Well, it’s a Valve event so it’s normal they push their own products. I’m not sure why I should be spending money to hear about it though. Okay, it’s a controller, it’s cool, so what. I’ll read the API doc when I have a game that fits it and it will be that. Turns out that so far the kind of games I made wouldn’t benefit from any kind of controller and that many people without such gadget could still buy my games and make me a millionaire so it just appear as additional icing on the cake that would give me diabetes right now.

Again, Valve has everything to gain by promoting their controller but I really don’t see why I should pay a plane ticket to hear about it.

Asia is a big market

And water is wet… It’s nice to know that Asia is becoming a big deal for Steam but it’s not something I can really act on unless I release a game with very few words in it. According to Straker Translations, getting a game like March of the Living translated would at least cost me around $12,000. Conquering Asia would make me a lot more money than $12,000 you say? Well, are you ready to lend me such money then?

As I said before, game development is risk management and right now I can’t afford to risk $12,000 (if you’re rich though you should totally go for it and let us know how it turned out…). Localization is not as simple as doing a quick copy/paste in Google Translate, it also requires some writing skills. My first language is French and I’m not even thinking about translating MotL in French because of that. French probably wouldn’t do much for the game anyway but even by not having to spend a penny I don’t feel it’s an exercise worth doing.

Steam will be updated in a major way soon

I’m curious about the changes but I’d be more interested to influence them than going to a conference to be told “change is coming”. What are the odds that a dev who sold around 10,000 copies of his game on Steam have any chance to have a meaningful talk with a Valve employee though?

I’d love Valve to organize a “I’m doing just okay” panel with devs with modest successes like me. I’d be the first one to submit my name and I think it could be quite interesting and reach many people. Steam doesn’t need to sell “more” games already doing well. They need to figure out how to sell all the other games not doing so well. By now, I’m not sure you can really do anything to make Stardew Valley an even bigger success than it already is. It’s already selling by itself. What you want is to maximize the power of the gigantic library of games not making much money.

When you’re only hearing from already successful devs though you’re only validating what you already have. You might be okay with it but if you’re really looking to make changes to make even more money then maybe hearing from other people might be useful.

]]>0Over00http://www.over00.comhttp://www.over00.com/?p=33102016-10-09T19:33:54Z2016-10-09T17:59:52ZA year ago I was losing my day job and didn’t know what would be next for me. I’ve been fortunate enough to have another indie dev to bet on me and because of this I can now say that I’ve been a full-time indie game dev for a year now!

Saying no to Ubisoft

A year ago, I was also saying no to Ubisoft after receiving a job offer from them. Back then, it wasn’t an easy decision to make. Who refuses a job offer from such employer just a few days after losing his job! Specially that the whole process went really fast (within a week I had a first contact, passed the interview and received an offer).

Looking back now, I’m glad I said no. First, I made more money being a full-time indie dev than I would have made working for Ubisoft. It sure wasn’t guaranteed when I started but eh, the results are there now. It could have gone the other way but it didn’t. Secondly, I’m not sure I would have really liked it there. It wasn’t a job to work directly on games first, it was only a programming job, it had huge commuting time and I probably wouldn’t be making games anymore on my free time.

Finally, if I would have taken the job I’d probably be torturing myself about missing the opportunity to work on my own games full-time. At least now, whatever happens, I can say that I did it, that I know what it is like and won’t have any regret of not trying it when it was possible.

Anxiety

I still don’t have full control over my anxiety of being self-employed but then many will say that you never totally get over this. I believe there are different levels of anxiety though. If MotL would have made me $200,000 so far then I’d know I have more time to fail and try again which isn’t the case right now.

Very successful devs might say they are living the same anxiety but if you release a relatively unsuccessful game and it doesn’t mean that you have to stop making games to look for a job it’s a bit different. If my next game is a flop then it’s over for me (my full-time dev status I mean). Some might say it can be a good thing to get you motivated and do your best because you’re under pressure but it would imply I don’t do my best in a safer position which is a bit insulting. Put the hat if it fits you but don’t force it on me.

The way I try to fight this anxiety is to accept that this might not last forever and this wouldn’t be the end of the world. I’d prefer it didn’t end but it might so it’s useless to stress over this. I’ll find something else or another opportunity will show itself. The experience I gained in the last year has a value so I must trust that I’ll do fine no matter what happens.

I still feel clueless

Well, not totally but I know that being successful doesn’t make me the guy who knows it all. I’ve received a few emails from other devs asking me for advice and I’m always careful to remind them that I can only tell them what I did and what I observed but that they shouldn’t take anything I say for granted. They should also seek the opinion of other people and then try to figure out what fit them in the mix.

A reason why you can feel clueless even by being successful is because of the Stegosaurus Tail’s. You can have a long period of time where you make little money and then a sale comes up and you’re back up again and then it goes down again, and up, down, etc. It means that you can have a terrible time figuring out how much money you’ll have made by the end of the year so it makes decisions like “how much can I afford to invest in my next project” terribly difficult to answer. It can be tempting to spend that initial big pile of money you make after release but then you need to remember the money you’ll make in following months will be quite different so you need to plan your budget carefully.

In order to try to feel a bit less clueless I built myself a prediction model comparing early sales of Human Extinction Simulator and March of the Living. My hypothesis was that since HES wasn’t a very successful game compared to MotL, the predictions I’d make would in fact be pessimists compared to the real results. My prediction one month after the release of MotL was that the game would make about $500,000 gross in one year which would mean about $175,000 net for me. I can tell you that if I use the same model today that my prediction is now quite far from my first prediction so obviously the model I used is completely wrong.

Trying to predict the success of a game by comparing it to another one is really difficult if not impossible. How “really” successful MotL will be is still unknown. At least until it finally goes through the full cycle of all seasonal sales and various deeper discounts.

Happy

I know I sound terribly negative here but that’s just the way I am. I’m still happy to be a full-time indie dev. I wanted to live this for so long and it finally happened. Maybe I had an idealized vision of what it really meant but how cool is it when you wake up in the morning it’s to make games! YOUR games on top of it.

If I went with the negative stuff first it’s just to show that “making it” (full-time status) doesn’t make you feel like you have completed something. You’re just getting started in fact. Well, unless you made a pile of money, could retire tomorrow and make games without caring about financial matters then yes, maybe you can feel like you have “won” indie game development. For most of us though it doesn’t go this way.

Maybe I was expecting to feel like crossing some finish line or something but I never had that feeling. Other self-employed people might celebrate getting their first client for example but I guess for me the real moment I felt like crossing a finish line was actually at the very beginning when I signed a deal with a publisher. Being able to start this wild adventure was actually my biggest victory as weird as it might sound…

]]>1Over00http://www.over00.comhttp://www.over00.com/?p=33062016-10-07T12:32:15Z2016-10-07T12:27:19ZUbisoft launched the Indie Series which is an annual competition for independent game development studios in Canada, offering funding, mentorship, and creative, marketing and financial tools. This includes $50,000 in funding.

From what I see there doesn’t seem to have any strings attached for winning. It says the game will be distributed through the UPlay PC Store but it doesn’t seem like it needs to be exclusively sold there (at least it doesn’t say so and Spearhead who received similar help is also selling Stories : The Path of Destinies on Steam).

There’s however a catch… If you’re a solo dev then you can forget about having a shot at winning as only studios of 2 to 50 persons can participate. I’m not sure what is the logic here and while anyone can enjoy $50,000, you can imagine how much more it could mean to a solo dev.

Would I actually participate if I could even if the date of the competition might not quite match the timeline for the current game I’m working on? Yeah, because delaying it might be worth it if it means having Ubisoft helping to promote it! Should I still submit something despite my “oh so special status”? No. If I’m not sure to get a shot at being admissible then it doesn’t make any sense for me to go into trouble and delay the game.

Now I’m not working alone on this game currently in development. I’ve partnered with my friend Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green who is living in the US. We haven’t formed a distinct legal entity for this game and have no intention of doing so because we can’t really afford the trouble or headaches this might involve. It’s like 2 studios were collaborating to release 1 game. So even if we’re a team of 2 we still don’t fit this criteria for the competition.

Solo indie game devs seem to get the short end of the straw when it comes to programs meant to help developing the video game industry in Canada. In Quebec there’s a tax break for game studios but it’s to provide a relief on employee salaries… Guess what it means when you’re self-employed…

So basically, those who might benefit the most from such help are left behind and big studios like Ubisoft are benefiting greatly from it. I understand that they are creating jobs but it turns out I also created a job in the last year: mine. I fail to see why it wouldn’t be worth it to help me to make sure I keep this job… By not having employees and keeping my business overhead thin, I make sure my business is profitable but sadly it doesn’t seem like it’s the kind of efficient business we want to see around…

]]>0Over00http://www.over00.comhttp://www.over00.com/?p=33032016-10-06T14:08:42Z2016-10-06T14:08:42ZScott Cawthon just pulled a brilliant trick to advertise his game by trolling the press. Two days ago he posted an announcement saying that his latest game would be delayed because he let himself get too dark with it. The press is of course very fond of this type of stories so some took the bait…

Now that the prank is revealed I bet that those who didn’t post about the initial announcement will post about how the whole thing wasn’t true… Talk about advertising your game for cheap…

Can all indie devs use this strategy?

Well, if you’re an unknown indie dev and you post as a joke that your game will be delayed for a strange reason, nobody will care. Scott Cawthon is a very successful indie dev so he already has a spotlight on him. If he sneezes, it’s possible the press will talk about it.

With that said, guerrilla marketing isn’t just about pranks made by famous devs. It might be difficult to figure what could work for a lesser known dev but unusual marketing strategies can be cheap so you’re probably not risking much by at least trying.

Backlash?

Of course! But even if Scott Cawthon wouldn’t have pulled this prank, some people would still find another reason to hate him. The moment you release a game, some people will find all kind of reasons to flame you so you might as well get something positive out of it (exposure).

The biggest challenge indie game devs are facing is to fight indifference. When nobody know you even exists you’re going nowhere. I didn’t even know there was a new Five Nights at Freddy’s game coming until I read about this prank so you can’t really say it’s a bad thing.

It’s not just about ads, conferences and press release

I guess it’s the lesson here. Marketing can start by simply keeping a blog (hello there!), being active on Twitter (but don’t just use it for self-promotion) or meeting people. It doesn’t mean it’s easy to get results but it can be easy and cheap to do.

It’s true that the best marketing is to make a game that almost sell by itself but until you get there, there are ways to promote your work that might eventually pay and won’t empty your wallet.

I don’t like this question. Different indie devs getting similar results might come to different conclusions and it’s really hard to get people to read between the lines to see the real picture. Book of Demons sold about 7,500 copies in 2 months in early access, which is a little less than what March of the Living achieved as a full release in 2 months (around 8,600). I was happy with those sales, but apparently the developers of Book of Demons came to a different conclusion.

The difference? I spent 6 months on MotL while Book of Demons has been in production for 3 years. I’m the only dev behind MotL vs 7 core team members for Book of Demons. As you can see, I didn’t need to sell 35,000 copies to call this project a success and I never expected such result either (all indie devs secretly wish for such success, of course, but eh….)

So asking the question “Why is selling good games so hard?” here seems to say that either MotL didn’t sell well or that it’s not part of the “good games” category so it sold as much as it could considering this. The truth however is probably that Book of Demons and MotL are selling as well as should be expected. The problem is that you can’t use development cost as a premise for the question “Why is selling good games so hard?”

Skewed expectations

Two things from the postmortem caught my attention in a weird way:

“To recoup the costs, we need to sell about 35 thousand copies of the game.”

There’s nothing wrong about working on a big project and trying to get big results. But you need to accept that things may not go the way you want when you need to sell 35,000 copies just to break even. It might seem like a low number when compared to top sellers, but the vast majority of games on Steam will never, ever sell that many copies. And this brings me to the other point:

“In theory, selling this much should be pretty easy. After all, hack & slash is a very popular genre, and games such as Grim Dawn, Torchlight, Path of Exile, Van Helsing are able to move hundreds of thousands or even millions of copies.”

You really can’t believe such thing! This is not a business plan! Maybe it wasn’t meant as an actual statement of expectation but it’s not the first time I hear such thing. If it were really as simple as checking what sells a lot and copy/paste results we’d all be doing this. I can’t look at the success of Firewatch and then start working on my own walking sim while telling myself “well, that game was a hit so there’s a reasonable chance mine will be as well”. At best it might hint that people are ready to buy the right type of game of that genre (something unknown for the first walking sim released) but you can’t put a number to that conclusion.

Hard work is not automatically rewarded

Game development isn’t an investment, it’s risk management. There’s a good reason big studios are pumping sequels after sequels; it’s way less risky than working on a new IP. This is a vital lesson that indie developers must heed, even if we want to work on exciting new projects instead of yet another sequel.

It might be a boring thing to say, but working on the game you want to make and hoping results will be proportional to your passion is simply blinding yourself to reality. It’s like the advice, “don’t quit your day job.” You should be prepared to the fact that things might not go the way you dreamed they’d go. You can get another mortgage on your house but, if you do, you shouldn’t be surprised if you eventually lose it. Going big is never a guarantee of anything.